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Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gottfried who wrote (3589)	6/9/1998 11:28:00 PM
From: Robert Salasidis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

Gottfried - I did prefix my statement with an "I think" which does not mean everyone needs to share my view. My reasoning is as follows: I am assuming that the release of products will occur on the stated schedule. Currently IOM offers 2G devices. I think they have already been hurt by CD-RW devices - I myself have bought one of these instead of a Jaz drive for flexibility reasons. Assuming IOM has not developed a new storage technology, they will not be able to have the capacity that NFR will offer - ie they may increase by 60% capacity annually as has been average for the drive industry, but I doubt they can increase by 5x in 6 mo. Cost wise, there is very little premium in the target pricing that was stated on the QNTM news release from current 2Gb Jaz devices (about 1.6x the price for 5x the storage). Admittedly, media pricing was not mentioned and this is something that remains to be seen (100-150 / 10 Gb would be very good - Jaz 2 Gb prices (reseller wholesale) are about 83$ / 2 Gb). On the DAT, low end 8mm, and low end DLT - any tape device costing over 500-1000$ that stores less that 10 Gb would be in danger of losing some market share. I am not claiming that tape backup will be dead, because backup costs, and physical storage space will remain in their favour. However, if backups require any random access, backup speed, no archiving (ie a limited quantity of media required), the speed and flexibility of random access will take away some customers. New markets that could be served include video servers (in the movie/hotel industry) online backups / library storage - assuming cartridge load / unload / access time is more favourable than tape (? about the first 2). For example in the hospital I work, CDs are currently used for radiology backups - using a larger storage device - could store more data, require fewer swaps, and speed up data access. Video editing, or possibly even use as a digital VCR - once one has the drive already - making a VCR out of it (at least MPEG-1 recording) would be inexpensive. Recording off a digital output from a satellite receiver should be possible as well with some extra hardware.